(Credits: Far Out / Pamela Des Barres)
Tue 16 September 2025 19:00, UK
Pamela Des Barres‘ recollections are some of the most eye-opening in all of music history. More than just a documenter of groupie antics, she also gave some crucial insight into the scene from the woman’s perspective.
Even the term itself – groupie – has become wildly misconstrued. An issue Des Barres touched upon herself in a previous Far Out interview. “People don’t understand the term,” she said. “They think of it as a slutty term, and it’s so not that at all, it’s the opposite of that. It’s just love. It’s really another word for love and the love of the music and the people who make it.”
Through her chronicles, Des Barres was linked to several of the biggest names in the business, from Mick Jagger to Frank Zappa. She’s one of the biggest music lovers you could possibly think of. She once called Bob Dylan a god, all while knowing that’s quite an eccentric comparison to draw. But she does because that’s truly how she feels, immersed in every sound, every moment she’s ever found herself in the middle of.
From Des Barres’ vantage point, all of these scenes paint a picture of its hedonistic centre, of how embracing and celebrating sensuality is often weaponised, especially when it’s connected to “groupie” women. But through sexual revolutions and women’s liberation, figures like Des Barres were a reminder that all it was was a celebration of pure and utter feeling.
The first time Des Barres saw Jimi Hendrix, she struggled to put into words the sheer electricity she was witnessing. She saw, firsthand, the residue of the counterculture movement dissolve into nothing, replaced by something far more primal that reinstated energy in music. There was no place for peace signs and flower crowns where Hendrix stood, at the epicentre of something feral, something that made the guitar look like a gift from heaven itself.
But nothing compared to when Des Barres caught Jagger in action. Finding her muse on the Sunset Strip, Jagger introduced Des Barres to the most “sensual” experience she ever had. In 1969, she wrote in her diary about the experience and how Jagger had put her in a limo to be taken to one of their concerts. She sat with him in his dressing room, where she “massaged his neck”.
She was feeling a little paranoid, but all it took to get over her anxiety was a previous quote from Jagger that she lives by: “Don’t worry about what others think of you, or you’ll never get it together yourself.”
“[He] is magical, truly spiritually evolved. He awes me,” she wrote, recalling how he was “wearing a long red scarf, and got down on his knees to whip the stage with it during ‘Midnight Rambler’,” which was “the most sensual thing I’ve ever seen.”
Then, in her familiar impassioned state, she vowed her devotion to Jagger over all other rock stars: “I want MJ, why not? About James [Page]… I AM going to accept it the way it is and groove. I couldn’t be promiscuous anyway, and there is no one I truly desire except the tangy MJ.”
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